In the Czech Republic, the granting of pardons is closely watched by the press and public, and if a connection can be found between a person pardoned or amnestied and the president or anyone around him, we usually find out about it. This applies to all officeholders in the history of the Czech Republic. In the United States, pardons have been greatly weaponized and used as a political tool
On the last day of his term, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo pardoned five assassins. Among them was 70-year-old David Gilbert. He is serving a sentence for participating in a bank robbery in 1981, in which two police officers and a guard were killed. However, it was not an ordinary robbery, but a terrorist action carried out by the radical left-wing group Weather Underground. Gilbert’s son, Chesa Boudin, is now a prosecutor in San Francisco and lobbied for his father’s release.
It was neither the first case of an amnesty that was lobbied for, nor the rehabilitation of Marxist thugs.
To mention those still in memory, Bill Clinton pardoned an internationally wanted fugitive and fraudster Marc Rich when leaving office. It is speculated that in addition to several business frauds, Rich was involved in the legalization of black funds of the KGB and other Eastern European secret services after the fall of communism.
Clinton also pardoned Susan Rosenberg, a member of Weather Underground who was in prison for possession of weapons and explosives. Today, Rosenberg sits on the governing bodies of a foundation that organizes fundraising for the Black Lives Matter movement.
Barack Obama released Oscar Lopez Rivera, a member of the leadership of the Puerto Rican terrorist organization Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was responsible for 130 bombings, one of which killed four people and injured 63 in a Manhattan restaurant.
However, this was not the first time that Barack Obama’s relationship with Marxist terrorists had become a topic. Before the 2008 election, it became clear that he knew and interacted with another Weather Underground member, Bill Ayers.
Obama explained it by saying, “He was just some guy in our neighborhood I knew.”
Ayers, along with Obama, lived in Hyde Park, an affluent neighborhood home to many Chicago elites. Despite Ayers living in one of the priciest neighborhoods in Chicago, he described himself as late as 2008 as a “radical, leftist, small-‘c’ communist.”
Later, it came to light that Obama and Ayers’ relationship went deeper than first assumed. For years, they sat together in the bodies of several foundations in Chicago. But most liberal commentators never thought to question their support for Obama about the connection nor did they flinch when it was also revealed that Obama was a member of a congregation that spread racist, conspiracy theories under the auspices of Pastor Jeremiah Wright.
Most American left-wing terrorists became members of “the good society“ as the 1960s cooled. They renounced violence, but not their efforts to change society. They have found many soulmates in academia. As a result of the “long march through the institutions,” there were plenty of people at the universities who shared the basic setting that the current social system was right to deconstruct, subvert, and disrupt. The extremists on the left, if they abandoned the violence, always found an understanding that right-wing extremists do not usually get. After all, belonging to the left in their eyes meant that they meant well and had hearts in the right place.
Thanks to this social climate, the New York Times managed to find a particularly memorable embarrassing situation with the aforementioned Ayers a few years before Obama. They published an interview with him, in which Ayers said, among other things, “I do not regret planting bombs. I feel like we haven’t done enough.”
And when asked if he could support bombings again in the future, he said, “I don’t want to rule out the possibility.“ It would be controversial words and controversial editorial decisions under any circumstances, but the New York Times was lucky enough to publish the interview on Sept. 11, 2001.
Reformed terrorists began to focus very prudently on two areas: education and prison service. They circulated ideas that are manifesting in full force today when pedagogy is one of the areas most colonized by critical race theory and other mutations of Marxism. Bill Ayers was a professor of pedagogy in Chicago, where he met Obama and a leading advocate of a radical Brazilian educator named Paulo Freire. According to external, objective evaluations, the school experiments carried out by the foundations in which Obama met Ayers never led to better educational results. But, as we see today, it was not, after all, about them, but about power.
Former left-wing terrorists cannot be denied one thing – they were intelligent and purposeful people. They understood the political potential of education and the criminal justice system well and learned to work in existing structures. In this political foresight, conservatives cannot match them. They have shown a comparable practical ability to act only in the judiciary, where the Federalist Society, in particular, has a large share in the still full reservoir of candidates for the office of federal judges.
After all, we see this in comparing how presidents exercise their right to pardon or completely stop prosecutions. Trump used it for the benefit of two collaborators in his campaign, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, and his son-in-law. Democratic politicians are abusing power strategically, in favor of their party’s political future.
Title image: In this Nov. 2, 2020 file photo, former President Barack Obama speaks at a rally as he campaigns for Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden at Turner Field in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
